Posts filed under 'food saftey'
Staying Healthy
I spent most of this week on the farm tending to fevers and sore heads, throats, and tummies. As terrible as that sounds, the farmer was better by day 3, the kids each after 1 or 2 days. We made lots of chicken soup from Kookoolan Farms’ birds with lots of veggies to make a rich, healthy, and healing broth. We sipped tea with some of the elderberry syrup we made at summer’s end for just such occasions, and we took hot baths and rested. In the end, we were happy that it was over quickly and that it wasn’t too bad.
We tend to look to food for our vitamins and minerals and medicines, and I feel blessed to be able to continue to eat fresh, nutritious vegetables through the fall and winter, times when our bodies are called on to fight off the colds and flus that come during this time of year. All growing vegetables and fruits begin to lose nutritive value once they have been picked, and they also will not reach their maximum nutritive value if they are picked under ripe to make it through shipping and handling to stores far and wide. And although each season offers its own set of repeating foods, we hope that with your CSA share you notice a rainbow of colors, from dark leafy greens to bright orange carrots and squash, with red, cream, purple, and white roots. All of these provide a well balanced supply of various vitamins and minerals and antioxidants. There are, no doubt, always many pieces to the pictures of our health, and colds and flus are hard to avoid, but I hope that you are staying well and enjoying the bit of natural medicine the healthy and tasty produce we share together provides!
Add comment October 27, 2009
The fruits of summer
There have been a few times over the course of this last week when a look out the window has made us think we were dreaming. So many cloudy, gray mornings this week, and rain! A really steady, gray all over kind of rain that lasted more than the length of a passing cloud. It looks like Oregon out there this morning, not just
Oregon in the middle of July. The rain is great though, even when the timing is a surprise. There was so little rain this spring, and so much sun, a little seasonal switcheroo. A reminder, I suppose, in case we were beginning to forget, that weather is so unpredictable. It sure keeps us on our toes here at the farm, our constant companion.
A rain like that which fell on Sunday is such a blessing in the middle of summer. Combined with the afternoon’s sunshine-y heat, the moisture and warmth are so great for all this growing. Still, another week spent watching flowers bloom (in mass quantities, might I mention) but still not fruit reminds us that patience is a virtue, however anxious we get. Our take on an old adage is that a watched plant
won’t grow…or something like that. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, all of our summer crops have been blooming for some time; still this week, it is just the summer squash that is ready for harvest. We’ll take it. As leery as the farmer was to put in as many summer squash plants as I urged him too, they are delicious to me, regardless of the ensuing insanity that they will lead us too! This first flush, picked on time, the perfect size, tender, delicious, ready for the grill, or for pizza or to be roasted or to be tossed with pasta and olive oil…so good!
The other flowers, the ones that will not fruit, but are planted just for the fun of it, are finally making their way towards the sky. Their late start was a bummer, but it looks like members will be able to begin picking bouquets if they wish about the same time they begin to pick their cherry tomatoes…soon!
We are busy ourselves, visiting other farms to pick berries. First strawberries, not too mnay. Then some cherries, a bit more. Now we are working on blueberries, the tastiest and easiest to pick for the main berry picker (me); so I will spend many days (hopefully) picking these summer treats for later winter eating. Raspberries have been picked as well, and some blackberries will be had soon too. The wonderful thing is that from our own farm we have had enough strawberries and raspberries this year for the kids to eat fresh throughout the day. That means now most of what we go out to pick gets put away for the winter—a huge step in the right direction for us. We got fairly tired of apples by the end of winter this year!
And speaking of picking and preserving the fruits of summertime, I should mention that this Saturday Slow Foods of Yamhill County will be hosting a class at the McMinnville library about Dehydrating Fruits and Vegetables, from 2:00-4:00 for anyone who would like to learn more about this preservation method. We use it occasionally, and although I didn’t get any cherries into the dehydrator like I wanted to, we are drying raspberry fruit leather right now, and will likely dry some grapes later this year. Using any method of food preservation you choose, it is a great (and essential) way to enjoy the products of summer when the gray, cool weather isn’t just a fleeting reminder, a mere dream of winter. It is a way to continue to eat locally through the season that many farms take a rest, and to supplement your CSA harvests of those seasons, which will be full with yummy produce, but not with the many vegetables that have come to be favorites to many. Preserving them now will give you their presence in winter, without necessitating a trip from a warmer part of the world.
The clouds from this morning will give way to sun soon enough, and we will get back our warm July weather. Berry picking, jam making, freezing, drying, canning—all sure signs of summer. Likewise, potlucks and parties come along with the season. So, before it gets away from us, we are trying to nail down a date for our first summer open farm and member potluck. Hopefully we will have a plan by next week. We only managed to get one date together last summer, but with everyone’s various summer plans, we missed a few of you last year, and are aiming for at least two nights of coming together at the farm this year to make it easier for everyone to attend one or the other. So, soon we can all come together around some good food and enjoy the farm together before the long nights of summer slip by. We already notice it as the morning knocks a little later and the night falls almost an hour earlier, such is that circling of the sun!
Add comment July 15, 2009
Blog For Food Campaign
Because our farm is young and because we started the whole thing coming off of five years of living on a single meager income, whenever we make arrangements to donate to the food bank, Andre always jokes that it is the needy helping the needy. Luckily, we aren’t needy in the food department, being able in land and body and knowledge to grow so much of it for ourselves. Even when we didn’t have so much space, we were able to do this for ourselves…I’m not sure what our food status would have been otherwise. Even with the few staples I go to the store for, a bag or two full of butter, bulk grains and beans and flours, coffee, cream, olive and coconut oil, fruit in the winter, some almond milk, sometimes some cheese–I walk away with a price tag that always surprises me. Food is expensive, especially nourishing food from good sources. And I know of how to save money (and resources) on these things, Azure Standard, and I know how to cook, and knowledge goes such a long way when we are talking about poverty and hunger.
So a group of Oregon bloggers have joined together to raise money for the Oregon Food Bank, I urge all of you to contribute to this campaign by clicking on the logo here to go to the OFB donation page (just write “blog for food” in the tribute section), as these food banks are helping a lot of our community members right now, and if we help to keep them well stocked, they will continue to be a great source of help come what may this year. But, and I don’t really have anything solid here, more like just a calling to arms, great help can also be spread through spreading information. This is more difficult than it sounds, I know. But helping our communities gain knowledge about how to have more control of our food security and more knowledge as to how this is integrally tied to the control we have over our own health..this would help us become a community that has even more assets to fight these huge issues of hunger, poverty, and health care.
You can always take food itself too. If you would prefer to donate food rather than money, we were given this information as well pertaining to this particular campaign: Sarah Pederson from Saraveza has generously offered her place as a food drop off site for the campaign. So if people would rather donate canned goods than cash, direct them to Saraveza! (http://saraveza.com/) Saraveza is located at 1004 N. Killingsworth, PDX 503-206-4252. Here in the valley, contact Tricia Harrop of YCAP at Ext. 124 – 503-883-4170 for information on how to donate in Yamhill County.
For us, we always feel blessed when we have fresh produce to donate. We have to provide for the business and our family first, and because of those larger needs, the first few years we donated little in comparison to what we were growing. Our hope is that with improved yields we can reach a point of donating every week. And this is something for everyone with means to consider…planting just a little extra in your garden can provide you with a way to help fight hunger with fresh, nourishing food. For those in need, a little from those of us who feel our needs our met, goes a long way.
1 comment February 4, 2009
Balance
For my birthday last month, a friend gave me a beautiful crafty framed textile piece with the words, “Happiness is the journey, not the destination” embroidered on it. We placed it right beside the door to exit the home, which is right by our kitchen. It felt like something good to read often, as we left the house or as we worked in the kitchen. Clearly our whole lives are journeys; but what I have been contemplating lately is not my life as a whole-my life’s journey…but rather the many mini journey’s our lives are made up of. My journey as a mother, which is such an integral part of who I am, of my life’s journey, has always changed and evolved in subtle ways as our family grew, and my children grew. It now seems to be faced with a new path, one on which I feel my feet dragging a little, while my oldest pulls me on to the parenting of an older boy, not the young babe who transformed me into a mother in the first place. My journey as a writer, something that absorbed me before I had children, then was virtually abandoned, and now find me again in some of these lines I write for your newsletters. But the journey I have been reflecting on most is that which concerns my family and food. As I myself become more and more aware of the myriad of issues surrounding the impact-on numerous levels-of the choices we make when we feed our families, I find that I am continually on a teeter totter, rocking back and forth between a feeling of impending doom and one of resolute hope.
Andre and I both love to cook food, both have spent time working in restaurants, and of course, love eating as well! Food has always been a source of shared joy for us, and we naturally wanted to share this with our children once they joined our family. However, it was also at this time in our lives that we instinctively became concerned with more than just our culinary experience when we ate. We began to understand the deep link between food and health. Even then, when we cooked so much of our own food, we didn’t know how inferior processed food was nutritionally. When we had children, it was natural for us to begin gardening, natural for us to buy organic, natural for us to avoid meat produced inhumanely. We began envisioning our farm, and began to delve into the murky waters of farming practices.
Still, it seemed impossible to find sources of local “organic” food in Nebraska, so we grew our own and ordered through a wholesale natural food co-op. When we moved here, we were delighted to have more access to organic food, but when Farmer’s Market began the first year we lived here, there was no organic food to buy. So off to the health food store we went, and then lo and behold, cheap organic food began to bless the shelves of mainstream grocery stores. It was hard to resist this when we were living on one income, trying to save money to get onto some land and begin farming. It was a blessing when our friends Katie and Casey Kulla moved to town and began Oakhill Organics, because we had just had a baby, were growing our food away from our home on someone else’s land (seriously neglected!!), and Katie and Casey provided organic food to the McMinnville Farmer’s Market at a great price.
Then, of course, we found our property, began preparing for our first season. As we began talking with other farms in the area, we discovered what a wealth of small farms there are in the area, and had a somewhat sobering realization that while we had been so concerned about eating healthier food, we had not dug deep enough, not even as deep as we were getting ready to ask our community to do, and searched out all of these local sources for food. From then to now, we have continually modified our diet and our food purchases as we evaluated what truly healthy, safe, and environmentally sound food was. We have learned a lot in the process, because as a whole, our society isn’t taught about or fed whole foods that grow in a natural setting, that are handled by only a few people before they come to our plate, and that have depths of flavor our taste buds have to learn to recognize.
And the reason I have been thinking about these things this week is because of a post on a friend’s blog, Rich Blaha of Mossback Farm, about food safety, a hot topic these days as more and more problems arise ( http://www.mossbackfarm.com/journal). There has been a recall on some ground beef here in Oregon and Washington contaminated with e-coli; all beef marketed as “Natural”, “Northwest grown”, and Organic. Rich’s point, and one I am keen to hone in on–these labels don’t mean much if the source is just as industrialized as their conventional counterparts, especially when it comes to meat and dairy production. And just thinking about this led me to think about how most food that we buy from the supermarket gets there. It is monocropped vegetables and feedlot or confinement raised animals, wholesaled to a packaging agent, who processes it or otherwise boxes it to sell around the world. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I know I have read that when you buy ground beef, it is meat from a whole lot of cows from a whole lot of farms mixed together in a large meat processing plant. And although I really don’t want to disgust you, or sound like an alarmist, the e-coli is in the meat because it is pretty much a given fact that these plants have such low quality standards that fecal matter ends up in the meat regularly. As I researched more, I found out that these plants are allowed to still use recalled meat in cooked, processed products such as canned chili and the like.
It is instances like this that find me on the “impending doom” spectrum of the teeter totter, because the truth is, we are not purists. We have been on a journey of learning and discovery about food and food systems ourselves, and know that just last year we purchased items we wouldn’t purchase again this year, and in the hectic day to day of life, make choices occasionally that would just plain contradict what we have learned. But to slide over to the “resolute hope” side of things again, I remember the amount we have changed in our lives as we have gained knowledge, and the bright future I see when I look at the number of you who committed to this local farm this year. You have become part of our journey, and together, I believe that there is hope that we can all learn and grow more towards a sustainable food system that we enjoy and that nourishes us all.
2 comments September 4, 2007
